The three main options
| POS-native ordering | Ordering specialist | Built for you | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Examples | Toast, Square | Olo | Your own app, web ordering or tools, custom or on a platform's APIs |
| Fits best | Brands on one POS that want ordering, payments and the kitchen in one system | Multi-brand or franchised enterprises with several POS systems and many partners | Brands whose operation, menu or guest experience doesn't fit a template, at a budget that fits them |
| Guest experience | The vendor's templates, with branding | Templates or your own front end | Fully yours |
| What you need | Little: setup and menu upkeep | An integration and digital team | A small senior team to build it with AI tools, and an owner to maintain it |
| Watch for | Everyone on the same POS; less room to differentiate | Integration effort across POS and partners | Maintenance, security and the POS and payment integrations |
For scale: Olo reports more than 750 restaurant brands and more than 400 integration partners; it was taken private by Thoma Bravo in September 2025. Pricing models across all three kinds (bundled with a POS plan, a monthly add-on, per-order fees, a license, or a build cost plus upkeep) change often, so get current quotes rather than relying on comparison sites.
Off the shelf, or built for you?
Until recently, a custom ordering app only made sense for the largest brands, because building and maintaining one took a permanent team. Agentic AI tools have changed that math. A small, senior team can now build an ordering front end, a menu service or a loyalty feature shaped exactly to your operation, for far less than it used to cost. No platform fits every brand, and you no longer have to bend your operation to fit one.
In my experience, a SaaS platform gets you about 80% of the way to your goal. The last 20%, the part that makes your brand different, is where the cost piles up: custom work you pay the vendor for, workarounds your team maintains, and features you wait quarters for on someone else's roadmap. That last 20% is exactly what's now affordable to build yourself.
That doesn't make custom right for everyone. What you take on when you own it:
- Maintenance: someone has to keep it running, updated and secure after launch.
- Payments and compliance: card processing should still run through a certified payment provider; build around it, not instead of it.
- The hard integrations: POS, kitchen systems and delivery partners are where custom projects get expensive. A common middle path is a custom front end on top of a platform's APIs.
The right answer is often a mix: a platform for the commodity parts, and something built for you where your operation or guest experience is different. Design & Build is how I do that work.
Seven questions to answer before you choose
- How many POS systems are in your system? One POS across every store makes POS-native ordering simple. Franchisees on different POS systems point to an ordering layer that integrates with all of them.
- How much of the experience do you need to own? If your app is how you compete, templates will hold you back. If ordering just needs to work, they're a feature.
- Can you manage the menu at scale? Prices, availability, day parts, modifiers and promotions by store. At Sonic I built a Digital Menu Manager for exactly this; menu operations are where ordering platforms quietly succeed or fail.
- How do loyalty and offers connect? Offers should apply to the right items in one step, in the app, on the web and at the register. Redemption is where offers fail.
- Which channels do you need? App, web, kiosk, catering, third-party marketplaces, and now AI agents. Square restaurants can take orders from ChatGPT and Claude, and Square and Toast restaurants through Google Maps' Ask Maps.
- Who owns the guest data? You need order history, identity and consent in your own hands to run loyalty and measure anything.
- What does it cost to switch later? Ask how menus, guest accounts and stored payment methods move if you leave.
The mistake I see most
Choosing the platform before deciding what the guest experience has to do. The platform demo always looks good. Write down the jobs guests need done (find the item, customize it, apply the deal, pay, pick up) and test each vendor against them.